Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Interstellar

On November 17, 1986, a Japanese crew of JAL (Japan Airlines) cargo jumbo freighter aircraft encountered three unidentified objects while flying over Alaska. The Boeing 747 cargo aircraft was on a routine flight from Paris to Tokyo cruising at 966 km/h (600MPH) at an altitude of 10 600 m (35,000 ft).

The plane was heading towards Anchorage, Alaska to re-fuel when at 5:11pm Captain Kenji Terauchi reported seeing three large objects flying below. He described the largest as resembling a shelled walnut. Captain Terauchi further described the largest craft as twice the size of an aircraft carrier. After several minutes observing the unidentified objects, the crew noticed that they matched the speed of the freighter plane and began trailing behind.

My dad used to tell me a UFO story when he was still alive. I was too young to recall the exact details, but he said we spotted an orange metallic object hovering over the sky.

You see, our old house had a big opening that leads to the neighbors' rooftops. We leave the huge window open at night to take advantage of the breeze. Then it just happened one evening: an unknown object in stationary flight appeared.

We knew it was a UFO after it was reported in the tabloids the next day. Records of the news article may have all been gone, but the personal account remains.

It has shaped my being.

Several years after the strange encounter with the mysterious aircraft, a UFO craze hit Manila. I remember those wall posters announcing the coming Rapture; Roy Alvarez and his TV appearances; Commander Ishtar and his armada of spaceships as big as the Araneta Coliseum; the "classified" documents my dad had obtained from local "ufologists."

When the fad died out, I turned my attention to science, space operas and strategy games to fuel my fascination: Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Carl Sagan, Master of Orion, Galactic Empires, Homeworld. My nerdy existence was driven by this thought; this mere ponder about our place in the sun in hopes of getting a piece of the answer.

But until now, I still ask:

Are we alone in the universe?

Strange as it is, but in a time when everyone has access to digital images, earth-like planets being discovered in distant stars, and microbes thriving in nearby planets, the age-old question remains.

Within a few months after these events Captain Terauchi was grounded, apparently for his indiscretion of reporting a UFO, even though he was a senior captain with an excellent flying record. Several years later he was reinstated. The UFOs in this case were tracked on both ground and airborne radar, witnessed by experienced airline pilots, and confirmed by an FAA Division Chief.

8 comments:

The question is intolerable. We don't know if we lived alone, well, if you asked me about ghost, bible can tell the real story about that, they exists, since God cast them here on earth. About those UFO's i don't know, but if they exists, i know not in our planet, it would be in the universe.